"I don’t tweet, but I do have a brief message for our president: Will you please get the hell out of the way for a few minutes? You and your antics are blocking our view of the damn world and it’s a world we should be focusing on!"

"if Trump and his antics didn’t take up so much room in our present American world, it might be easier to take in so many other potential dangers on a planet where matches seem in good supply and the kindling prepared for burning.

"You could look to the Middle East, for example, and the quickly morphing war against ISIS, which could soon become a Trump administration-lit fire involving Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and even Russia, among other states and groups.

"Or you could look to the possible future passage of some version of a Republican health care bill and the more than 200,000preventable deaths that are likely to result from it in the coming decade."

" I suspect that the tweets and insults — whether Trump’s, Scarborough’s, or Kristol’s — act as a kind of smoke screen. In readership and viewership terms, of course, they’re manna from heaven for the very “fake news media” Trump loves to hate. They’re “wins” for them as well. In the process, however, the blood, the pigs, and all the rest of the package of Washington’s insult wars help keep our eyes endlessly glued on the president and on next to nothing else in our world. They blind us to our planet and its troubles.

"Can there be any question that Donald Trump’s greatest talent is his eternal ability to suck the air out of the media room? It was a skill he demonstrated in stunning fashion during the 2016 election campaign, accumulating an unprecedented $5 billion or so in free media coverage on his way to the White House. It’s safe to say, I think, that never in history have so many cameras, so many reporters, and so many eyes been focused so never-endingly on one man. He looms larger than life, larger than anything in our screen-rich world. He essentially blocks the view, day and night.

"In that sense — in the closest I’ve probably come to such an insult myself — I recently labeled him our own “little big man.” He’s petty, small in so many ways, but he looms so large, tweet by bloody tweet, that it’s hard to see the burning forest for the one flaming tree."

"As it happens, we know (or at least could know) a little about the nature of those “options.” Only the day before, Trump’s national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, confirmed reports that a new set of options had indeed been prepared for the president. “What we have to do,” he tolda Washington think tank, “is prepare all options because the president has made clear to us that he will not accept a nuclear power in North Korea and a threat that can target the United States and target the American population.” As McMaster himself made clear, “all options” included new military ones, assumedly for hitting the North and its nuclear program hard."

"Similarly, if Trump and his antics didn’t take up so much room in our present American world, it might be easier to take in so many other potential dangers on a planet where matches seem in good supply and the kindling prepared for burning. You could look to the Middle East, for example, and the quickly morphing war against ISIS, which could soon become a Trump administration-lit fire involving Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and even Russia, among other states and groups. Or you could look to the possible future passage of some version of a Republican health care bill and the more than 200,000preventable deaths that are likely to result from it in the coming decade."

"Or you could focus on a president who has turned his back on the Paris climate agreement and is now plugging not just North American “energy independence” but full-scale “American energy dominance” on a planet on which he promises a new fossil-fueled “golden age for America.” In such an age, with such a president — if you’ll excuse the word — hogging the limelight, who’s even thinking about the estimated 1.4 billion “climate-change refugees” who could be produced by 2060 as the world’s lowlands flood? As a comparison, the 2016 figure on “forcibly displaced people” globally that set a post-World War II record, according to the U.N. refugee agency, is 65.6 million, a staggering number that would be but a drop in the bucket in our overheating future if those 2060 figures prove even close to accurate."

A World of a Tweeter-in-Chief and “Some Stirred-Up Moslems”

"A media obsessed with the travails of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s daughter Mika at the fervently tweeting hands of President Donald J. Trump? Who woulda thunk it?

"Make America great again? You must be kidding. It’s time to stop insulting pigs and focus instead on the state of our planet."

This piece says so much more. it is worth the time and effort to read it all.

Replies to This Discussion

Great article, Joan! The author is 100% right about twitter-distraction.

I didn't know that 45* "is now plugging not just North American “energy independence” but full-scale “American energy dominance” on a planet on which he promises a new fossil-fueled “golden age for America.” Nor that an " estimated 1.4 billion “climate-change refugees” ... could be produced by 2060..." Talk about a dramatic change in the world - wow!